Romain > Romain's Quotes

“They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Any successful person has to decide what to do in part by deciding what not to do.”
― Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

“It is therefore imperative that you identify your work as both personally interesting and, at the same time, integrally connected to the well-being of others.”
― Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

“Kaizen is Japanese for resisting the plateau of arrested development. Its literal translation is: “continuous improvement.”
― Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

“I learned that Bill himself has long appreciated the importance of competencies other than talent. Back in the days when he had a more direct role in hiring software programmers at Microsoft, for instance, he said he’d give applicants a programming task he knew would require hours and hours of tedious troubleshooting. This wasn’t an IQ test, or a test of programming skills. Rather, it was a test of a person’s ability to muscle through, press on, get to the finish line. Bill only hired programmers who finished what they began.”
― Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

“I found the concept of hindsight bias fascinating, and incredibly important to management. One of the toughest problems a CEO faces is convincing managers that they should take on risky projects if the expected gains are high enough. Their managers worry, for good reason, that if the project works out badly, the manager who championed the project will be blamed whether or not the decision was a good one at the time. Hindsight bias greatly exacerbates this problem, because the CEO will wrongly think that whatever was the cause of the failure, it should have been anticipated in advance. And, with the benefit of hindsight, he always knew this project was a poor risk. What makes the bias particularly pernicious is that we all recognize this bias in others but not in ourselves.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

“Because learning takes practice, we are more likely to get things right at small stakes than at large stakes. This means critics have to decide which argument they want to apply. If learning is crucial, then as the stakes go up, decision-making quality is likely to go down.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics

“We do small stuff often enough to learn to get it right, but when it comes to choosing a home, a mortgage, or a job, we don’t get much practice or opportunities to learn. And when it comes to saving for retirement, barring reincarnation we do that exactly once. So Binmore had it backward. Because learning takes practice, we are more likely to get things right at small stakes than at large stakes. This means critics have to decide which argument they want to apply. If learning is crucial, then as the stakes go up, decision-making quality is likely to go down.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

“One way to salvage the Becker conjecture is to argue that CEOs, coaches, and other managers who are hired because they have a broad range of skills, which may not include analytical reasoning, could simply hire geeks who would deserve to be members of Becker’s 10% to crunch the numbers for them. But my hunch is that as the importance of a decision grows, the tendency to rely on quantitative analyses done by others tends to shrink. When the championship or the future of the company is on the line, managers tend to rely on their gut instincts.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics

“This reflects a general tendency. People are more willing to lie by omission than commission. If I am selling you a used car, I do not feel obligated to mention that the car is burning a lot of oil, but if you ask me explicitly: “Does this car burn a lot of oil?” you are likely to wangle an admission from me that yes, there has been a small problem along those lines. To get at the truth, it helps to ask specific questions.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics

“Steve’s performance illustrates a key insight from the study of effective practice: You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.”
― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

“The relationship of the big Wall Street banks to the high-frequency traders, when you thought about it, was a bit like the relationship of the entire society to the big Wall Street banks. When things went well, the HFT guys took most of the gains; when things went badly, the HFT guys vanished and the banks took the losses.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys

“blinking is a vital activity that provides another means of reevaluating a situation. Closing our eyes seems to provide a micropause that momentarily deactivates our attention and allows us, for the briefest of moments, to refresh and renew our consciousness and perspective.16”
― Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

“A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning by heart (for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the book once more.” —William James, writing in 189012”
― Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

“The nineteenth-century French economist Emile Dupuit pointed to the early railways as an example: It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches … What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from travelling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich … And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.”
― Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist

“The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious).”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”8 —Physicist Richard Feynman, advising how to avoid pseudo-science that masquerades as science”
― Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

“whenever possible, you should blink, shift your attention, and then double-check your answers using a big-picture perspective, asking yourself, “Does this really make sense?”
― Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

“Cygnus Atratus In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Further, as we discovered during the financial crisis that started in 2008, these blowup risks-to-others are easily concealed owing to the growing complexity of modern institutions and political affairs. While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, who had the downside for their actions, and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact reverse is taking place. We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D. (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. They game the system while citizens pay the price. At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“The word experience comes from the Latin experientia, meaning ‘to try’, whereas the word aware comes from the Greek horan, meaning ‘to see’. Experience implies participation in an event, whereas awareness implies observation of an event.”
― Daniel M. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness: An insightful neuroscience self-help psychology book on cognitive enhancement and human behavior

“The historian Will Durant performed the remarkable feat of summarizing Kant’s point in a single sentence: ‘The world as we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost–one might say–a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli.”
― Daniel M. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness: An insightful neuroscience self-help psychology book on cognitive enhancement and human behavior

“FAT TONY: “My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“Nearly four centuries ago, the philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon wrote about the ways in which the mind errs, and he considered the failure to consider absences among the most serious: By far the greatest impediment and aberration of the human understanding arises from [the fact that]…those things which strike the sense outweigh things which, although they may be more important, do not strike it directly. Hence, contemplation usually ceases with seeing, so much so that little or no attention is paid to things invisible.6”
― Daniel M. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness: An insightful neuroscience self-help psychology book on cognitive enhancement and human behavior

“But just as we tend to treat the details of future events that we do imagine as though they were actually going to happen, we have an equally troubling tendency to treat the details of future events that we don’t imagine as though they were not going to happen. In other words, we fail to consider how much imagination fills in, but we also fail to consider how much it leaves out.”
― Daniel M. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness: An insightful neuroscience self-help psychology book on cognitive enhancement and human behavior

“In coding, as in carpentry, you need the right tool for the job.”
― Russ Olsen, Eloquent Ruby

“Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present, and I feel now
The future in the instant. Shakespeare, Macbeth”
― Daniel M. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness: An insightful neuroscience self-help psychology book on cognitive enhancement and human behavior

“Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.”
― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness